THE ILLUSTRATED SCRIBBLER'S TOOLBOX

Write scenes that work. With a pencil or with AI.

Ironic Monkey wants to write. The Elephant, an AI, will draft anything in seconds. The Cat is the reader, and the Cat falls asleep the moment a page stops working.

In this comic workbook the three of them show you screenwriter Jesse Alexander's favorite sixty-nine tools for screen scribbling, sorted into eight drawers, from Starting to Keep Going. For maximum clarity, every tool is taught with one small and simple story: Ben, his sister Jo, and five hundred dollars.

Each of the twelve FULL tools gives you a short comic that shows the tool at work; Spot the Miss, two drafts of the same scene where you find the one that puts the Cat to sleep; and a full-size worksheet to fill in with your own story. Every tool also has a card at the back to cut out and keep.

Every tool works with just a scribble. The AI notes are optional. They show what to ask an AI for, and which choices stay with the writer.

The book was designed for new writers, mentees and their mentors, writing groups, and schools.

This book was built with Claude AI from the blog posts of Jesse Alexander. He guided, shaped, and critiqued the book through development. Ironic Monkey and the other characters in the book are based on his doodles. Clearly, Jesse is not an artist. Chat GPT used Jesse's "art" as reference when building the comic pages. The PDF of this book is free under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0: share it and adapt it with credit, and please don't sell it.